Probably em-dash in a formatted document rather than pair of hyphens like I'd use here. I'm pretty sure there are some stylistic recommendations about parens vs. em-dashes. I probably used to overuse parens but, in spite of being on my company's style committee for almost 15 years, I'm not sure I was ever all that consistent and I'm not sure we had hard and fast rules.
Comments
People write like they read and speak, which is where this mistake comes from
The right way is to replace the parentheses with a pair of dashes, one before and one after the deemphasized clause
Or just remove the parens. They don't really add (much of) anything. (See what I did there?)
Or maybe:
"... trying (unsuccessfully) to succeed..."
I think these are all really good points. I certainly need to improve at my article writing abilities. I have removed the parentheses from the title.
Probably em-dash in a formatted document rather than pair of hyphens like I'd use here. I'm pretty sure there are some stylistic recommendations about parens vs. em-dashes. I probably used to overuse parens but, in spite of being on my company's style committee for almost 15 years, I'm not sure I was ever all that consistent and I'm not sure we had hard and fast rules.